Who

A Blizzard in July

Different people do different things with their vacations. Some people ski.
Some people windsurf. Me? I catch up on all the videogames I’ve been meaning
to play.

I realize that this may confuse my readers. Don’t I already spend all of my
free time playing videogames? The answer is: no. I am, regrettably, an
unrepentant workaholic, and as much as I enjoy playing games (and writing
about them), it ain’t my day job. That takes priority, then come reviews
that I’m paid to write, and then comes this blog, along with several other
hobbies and artistic outlets of
roughly equal priority. The truth is, lately it feels like I’ve been writing
about games more than I’ve been playing them.

So now that I have a chance to breathe, I’ve been catching up. A number of
publishers sent me some games to review, and I have a few longer-running games
that I wanted to dig into. Then something curious happened that made me
pensive.

There’s a game developer and publisher called
Blizzard. This is the company whose World of
Warcraft enables their employees to spend every day rolling around naked in
fat sacks of cash. Blizzard has always been an intriguingly non-evil company.
They have a stable of games that are developed around their own properties,
rather than just licensing titles. Their games are always very finely polished
and well-supported. And they nearly always release their games simultaneously
on Windows and MacOS, which has made them near and dear to my heart.

Blizzard just announced the latest installment of their Diablo series,
Diablo III. Along with this, they made Diablo II available for digital
download, at a price competitive with what you’d pay in the stores. Back in
the day, I didn’t own these games – my roommate did. So I bought Diablo,
and the expansion, and Starcraft, and have been happily playing them.

So here I am, on vacation. I am 500 miles from the nearest Best Buy, which
might be out of stock of the games I wanted anyway. I can make a snap
decision, at 10 pm at night, to buy a game, and three clicks and one longish
download later, I have achieved gratification. The publisher gets paid. The
consumer gets satisfied. Everyone wins.

There’s just one question left to be answered. I direct this question to those
of you who are publishing games that are not available for digital download.
I direct this question to those of you who publish games that, idiotically,
require me to keep your stupid CD or DVD in my drive while I play. I direct
this question, in other words, to the other 90% of the “PC gaming” market. The
question is: What the hell is wrong with you?

This transaction with Blizzard leverages several of the advantages the PC has.
It uses the hard drive so that I don’t have to have a physical token (beyond
the machine) to play the game. It uses the network to deliver the game to me,
so I don’t have to drive around to three different GameStops before I find the
product I want. Meanwhile, on another planet, Atari is still selling games
with cd-checks and Securom in them because, apparently, they don’t want to
sell games that run in laptops on an airplane. Or in VMWare virtual machines
on Macs. Given this attitude, I can only presume that when the CEO of Atari
wants to fry an egg, the first thing he does is look for two sticks to rub
together so he can make a fire.

Copy-protection shills and industry apologists will throw around excuses for
this incredible business failure. They’ll natter and whine about how Diablo
II is an old game, anyway, and that’s why they don’t have to worry as much
about piracy. But as a consumer, let me tell you: the fact that the game was
old was not an issue. If this had cost $50, instead of $20, I still would
have bought it. You can find Diablo II on any Bittorrent search engine, but
given how easy it is to pick up a legal copy, why bother stealing it?

When talking to dyed-in-the-wool PC gamers, there’s an attitude that would be
charmingly naive if it wasn’t so corrosive: it’s the idea that, in the end,
winners and losers in the marketplace will be determined by “the best
technology,” where “technology” is narrowly construed to mean the most pixels
pushed per second, or the best physics simulation, or what have you. What the
companies that are actually winning in the marketplace have figured out is
that taking care of their customers is just as important as pushing pixels.

Treating your customers like enemies might have worked OK when most people who
bought video games were teenagers. In today’s game market, it’s simply a
recipe for disaster.